Before today, involving Kinsley in his quest to find Fatima had been out of the question, but with Bharat taken by Truthers, Elena Ryke expecting a disc he didn’t have while holding Emiko hostage, and a little over nineteen hours before torture nanos burned him alive ... this was it. This was his only option.
Yet, Jan realized with a tinge of sadness, if he actually pulled off this job — found Fatima, found Tarack’s disc, killed Fatima for betraying him — Kinsley would never forgive him. She would find out, and she would hate him, forever.
Could he pay that price for revenge?
Jan thought again of Fatima’s hologram outside the library. Fatima had claimed she hadn’t betrayed him, despite obviously doing so, but why? Why would she gaslight him?
He’d just find her. He’d just ask her.
And then he would or would not shoot her in the head.
06: Truthers
The door slammed. Heavy footsteps retreated. And now that two very large men had finally stopped kicking the shit out of him, Bharat Dhillon opened his eyes and took a look around.
His captors had locked him in a gray biocrete cell about the size of a bathroom. The two masked natural-born had given him a tattered sleeping bag to rest on, which seemed an odd concession after the incessant violence. Other than the bag, the only other feature of his small cell was a bucket.
Bharat crawled over and puked his guts up into it.
Even through the significant pain-deadening provided by his Personal Brain Assistant, Bharat had felt horrible during the act and only marginally less horrible afterward. Suppressing his sense of pain didn’t do anything about the smell, and the sight of so much blood among the vomit and — was that a tooth? — was not encouraging. Still, at least the beating hadn’t hurt ... much.
Better yet, he still had all his fingers and toes. Those two men had beaten him bloody, but they hadn’t burned or cut him. Bharat suspected such things would come later, after they’d given him some time to think about the Commander’s offer.
“Confess your crimes. Implicate your corrupt leaders. Apologize for your part in the atrocities, and die with dignity.” It was an easy offer to remember, given the Commander had repeated it after every portion of Bharat’s mock trial.
“The Commander” was the gray-haired, brown-skinned old man with a bushy moustache and wire-rimmed glasses. He’d spent the last four hours interrogating Bharat. Two guards had taken turns thwacking the back of Bharat’s head every time he failed to answer one of the Commander’s questions, which, to be fair, had been pretty much all of them.
If there was one thing Bharat had taken away from his interrogation training, it was that not talking was better than talking, even if two dickheads kept thwacking you in the back of the head. The longer he held out before giving them anything, the longer he had where an opportunity might arise to escape.
In the preceding four hours — four hours that had followed at least two in solitary confinement — Bharat had discovered himself personally responsible for the following during the Supremacy’s ten-year occupation of Ceto:
Creating five secret detention bases the Supremacy maintained while they occupied Ceto, and the deaths of six hundred forty-two prisoners who never made it home ...
The assassination of five different Ceto politicians opposed to partnering with the Supremacy, as well as full involvement in the efforts to scapegoat innocent people who were falsely charged with those assassinations ...
The deaths of at least twelve different leaders of the Patriots of Ceto on various raids, ambushes, or patrols, as well as the death of five hundred twenty-four “freedom fighters” in battles to free the planet ...
And finally, shooting the pet parrot of the daughter of Pioneer Point’s mayor in front of her. Because, really, what kind of asshole shot a child’s parrot in front of her?
That Bharat had participated in none of these acts did not matter to the Commander, and if Bharat was being honest with himself, it didn’t matter at all. No rescue was coming, and it seemed likely he would now die on a planet he didn’t like with people he didn’t know. Worse yet ... it was his own damn fault.
Alone in the only city on Ceto that felt vaguely like home, Bharat had let his guard down. He had assumed he would be faster, stronger, and more alert than any natural-born who might want to take him. He had assumed any natural-born who might want to take him wouldn’t be in the Luxury District at all. So now here he was, in a cell, covered in bruises and puking blood and teeth into a bucket.
Teeth. In a bucket.
Shit, that could actually work.
Bharat reached into the slop and dug around until he had something small and sharp to clasp in one hand. Judging from its size and shape, it had likely been one of his canines.
Bharat wasn’t going to die on this overgrown dust ball if he could avoid it. He had a wife and child waiting for him back on Phorcys. He wasn’t going to give up on either of them without a rather impressive fight.
“Psst!” A raspy voice whispered through the palm-sized air vent embedded in the wall to his right. “Anyone in there?”
As far as a plan of escape, figuring out who was stuck in the cell beside him would be a good place to start. Bharat wiped his vomit-stained hand, now clenched around the tooth, on his equally disgusting prospector pants. How should he broach this?
“You awake?” the same quiet, raspy voice asked. “If you are, you could at least say hello. Not much else to do in here.”
This could be a trick from his captors to get him
